Saturday, August 06, 2016

Today, we have a Superfecta of attack dogs from the NY Fishwrap (see the Directory below). Their target? Donald T. (for "The") Chump or He Who Would Be POTUS 45. If this is (fair & balanced) vintage bloodred journalism (x4), so be it.

“I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.” — Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter of Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal, speaking to Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.

You know who I am. I don’t need to tell you. That’s the point. Everyone knows. That schmuck Schwartz, I made him a pile of money, didn’t have a cent before, and he thinks he wrote my book, but he couldn’t have written it without me. That’s OK, but honestly he doesn’t even write good.

Never had a problem with the press. They don’t get it. I’ve crashed the system. I’m using the press, every one of them! Schwartz did have one phrase I really loved in my book. He said “I play to people’s fantasies” by using “truthful hyperbole.” [emphasis supplied] What he meant is I make stuff up.

Sure. Nobody cares. They want to dream. They want a spectacle. They want gold and towers. They want me to get tough. Fact-checkers! Is that even a job?

By the way, Schwartz was surprised I asked him to write my book. He’d written a negative cover story about me for New York magazine in 1985. Give me a break! I was on the cover. That’s all that matters. The surface. I stuck the cover up in my office.

You know who I am. Of course you do. You can’t get enough of me. The press has given me a couple of billion dollars in free publicity. Honestly. That’s a good deal. People can’t do without me. You seen the ratings for CNN when it’s about me?

Take that baby the other day. In Virginia, I think. The baby was crying and I said, don’t worry, I love babies. Then I turned on the mom: “Actually I was only kidding. You can get that baby out of here.”

Show authority. Keep people on their toes. Bully them a little. Contradict yourself. Remind them you can get nasty. “You’re fired!” Terrific line.

Keep your options open. Always. Consistency is dull. You think I got to be one of the richest guys in the country by being consistent?

The media loved it. Look, he even hates babies! Nobody hates babies. Same way he hates Muslims and Mexicans! Big story everywhere. Just as the story of the Muslim dad with his quiet wife who wants to teach me the Constitution began to fade. Perfect timing, really.

All the press that hates me, Washington Post, New York Times, full of me. Twitter, too. The whole world! Honestly, sometimes it makes me laugh. Especially when they say he’s gone too far now, he’s peaked! I love that. I tell you, can’t remember how many times I’ve “peaked” — and usually in a story on Page One.

By the way, you may be wondering why I’m writing this diary. I don’t read books. Don’t have time. I don’t like planning or consultants. Or reflection. It’s all gut with me. But I figure some day people may wonder how I got to be president of the United States.

That’s easy. I know what Americans want. They don’t want truth. They want excitement, disruption. They want to be led. They want authority. They want victories. They want parades. They want a wall at the Mexican border — so let them think I really might build one! You think they’re happy with Obama’s managed decline? Give me a break!

All I have to do in the next 96 days is make Hillary seem dull. You know, yesterday’s news. Used goods. Rigged, crooked establishment. Americans want change. She’s more of the same.

And, honestly, she’s no more honest than I am! Truth is over. Attention spans are over — and I never had one anyway. That’s what the press doesn’t get.

That Schwartz, he was a journalist when I proposed the book. He did get one thing right. My book says: “I like thinking big. I always have. To me it’s very simple: If you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.”

That last line sounds familiar. Maybe my daughter Ivanka borrowed it in Cleveland. But it came from my book, which, in truthful hyperbole, I wrote.

Thinking big! We’ve been way too predictable. What’s wrong with having Denmark or even China think that if they insult me they might wake and find they’ve been nuked? You’ve got to maximize flexibility. And all the freeloaders out there who’ve gotten used to us not using our leverage, they are going to have to think again. Personally, if Putin eats Estonia, I’m not going to lose sleep over it. But I’m not going public with that yet.

I see that schmuck Schwartz says he’d call my book The Sociopath if he was writing it today. Not a bad idea! I’m thinking of renaming it. I like it. Bet it would sell millions of copies. Especially when promoted from the Oval Office. Ω

[Roger Cohen joined The New York Times in 1990. He was a foreign correspondent for more than a decade before becoming Foreign Editor in 2001. Since 2004 he has written a column for the Times-owned International Herald Tribune, first for the news pages and then, since 2007, for the Op-Ed page. He is the author of three books: Soldiers and Slaves (2005); Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo (1998); and (with Claudio Gatti) In the Eye of the Storm (1991). His family memoir, The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family, is forthcoming in January 2015. Born in London, Cohen received an BA (history and French) from Oxford University.]

The government is arranging classified intelligence briefings for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to prepare them for the White House. This longstanding practice of briefing nominees is controversial this year: Senator Harry Reid has urged the C.I.A. to give Trump a “fake” briefing, while House Speaker Paul Ryan has said Clinton can’t handle classified material. But what would a Trump briefing look like, anyway?

“Mr. Trump, I’m Gene Smith from the CIA.”

“Smith, huh? Is that your code name? You know, I know a huge amount about the CIA., more than most C.I.A. directors. A terrific, beautiful, very good organization.”

“Actually, Smith is my real name. Anyway, let’s get started with China and our assessment that Xi is much more aggressive than Hu.”

“She is more aggressive than who?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, I’d like to meet her. I like aggressive women. She sounds like a 10.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. That aggressive woman.”

“I’m not sure I understand. Anyway, in China we assess with high confidence that Xi will continue this aggressive nationalistic ——”

“She sounds hot. No, I’m just joking. But, seriously, women love me.”

“Mr. Trump, Xi is a man, president of China.”

“She is a man? China’s president is trans? Boy, they’re more modern than I realized — I mean, I knew that. I know so much about China. You should see me use chopsticks! Did I ever tell you about this hot Chinese girl I once dated? She was so modern, and built like ——”

“Mr. Trump! We expect China will maintain its nationalistic claims in the South China Sea ——”

“Oh, don’t worry. I have lots of Chinese friends. I love Chinese food. Best pad Thai in the world at Trump Tower. So what’s your take, what do the Chinese think of me?”

“We assess with high confidence that the Chinese leadership wants you to win the election.”

“I’m not surprised. There are very, very bad reporters at completely and totally failing newspapers that nobody reads who say I might start a trade war. But China wants me to win the election! Amazing! So why does she want me to win, that transsexual president of theirs?”

“Xi is not trans! Xi would like you to win because alliance management is not your priority, and your presidency could lead to an unprecedented decline in U.S. influence.”

“Unprecedented! Amazing! So the Chinese think that I’d be unprecedented? Who else likes me?”

“Well, North Korea has already officially endorsed you, Mr. Trump. It called you ‘prescient’ and ‘wise.’”

“‘Present and wise!’ They love me! And Russia loves me, too. Putin and I go way back. We’re like this” — Trump knits his fingers together — “and after I’m elected I hope to finally meet him.”

“Yes, we believe that President Putin is backing you.”

“Putin the Pro. Not like Little Ukraine. Sad!”

“Well, Putin believes that NATO might collapse in your presidency and that he would have a freer hand in Ukraine and the Baltics.”

“The Baltics, I know them better than anybody! Melania is from Slovenia. Some people say I leaked those amazing pictures of her to The New York Post. Why would I do that? Did you see them? Here ——”

“Mr. Trump! And you mean the Balkans, even though Slovenia isn’t ——”

“Balkans, Baltics — I don’t get bogged down in details. I’m a strategy guy. Now what about ISIS? I know more about ISIS than the generals do. But I’d like to hear your take. Are they supporters?”

“We assess that they are supporting you in the belief that you help recruitment. Indeed, we fear that they may conduct a terror strike in hopes of helping you get elected.”

“Everybody’s supporting me! What about the Middle East? I’ll probably do a peace deal — I’m a terrific deal maker, you know that? I’ll probably get a Nobel Peace Prize to go with my new Purple Heart.”

“Well, sir, the Middle East is complicated ——”

“The Middle East is a complete and total disaster. They don’t respect us. What about nuclear weapons? If we have nukes, why not use ’em?”

“Sir, we only offer intel, not policy advice. But ——”

“Shouldn’t we just drop a few nukes on those Kurds?”

“The Kurds? In Syria, they’re our only effective ally.”

“They’re doing bad things. Very bad things. I saw it on a Sunday show.”

“Oh, you mean... the Quds Force?”

“Kurds, Quds, what’s the difference? If I give the order to bomb ’em, you guys can sweat the details. Call Mike Pence.”

“But you’re running to be ——”

“Anyway, tell me about internet security. I’m a little bored. How about we hack into the phone of Miss Sweden and check out her selfies? When I’m elected I’m going to have a whole team on that....” Ω

[Nicholas D. Kristof writes op-ed columns that appear twice each week in The New York Times. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he previously was associate managing editor of The Times, responsible for the Sunday Times. Kristof received a BA (government, Phi Beta Kappa) from Harvard College and then received a BA (law) from Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. In 1990 Mr. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, also a Times journalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China's Tiananmen Square democracy movement. They were the first married couple to win a Pulitzer for journalism. Mr. Kristof won a second Pulitzer in 2006, for commentary for what the judges called "his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world." Kristof's most recent book (with wife and co-author, Sheryl WuDunn) is A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity (2014).]

After a week in which Donald Trump insulted babies and their mothers and war heroes and their families, and threw in fire marshals for good measure, the scariest thing to come out of his team of thugs and political mercenaries is this: the suggestion that civil unrest could follow if he’s denied the presidency.

When the Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the White House in 2000 even though he lost the popular vote, Al Gore graciously conceded and faded away. When Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama four years ago although his internal polls showed a Republican triumph, he congratulated the winner and went off to rediscover his many grandchildren.

Despite party-machine manipulation and considerable voting of the dead, the American institution that produces a peaceful transfer of power has survived.

But this year, facing a likely trouncing in November, Trump has signaled that he will try to bring down our democracy with him. His overlooked comment — “I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged” — is the opening move in a scheme to delegitimize the outcome.

Because Trump is consistently barbaric and such a prolific liar, it’s hard to sustain outrage over any one of his serial scandals. But his pre-emptive attack on the electoral process is very troubling.

To understand what Trump is up to, listen to his doppelgänger, the veteran political operative Roger Stone. He will say things that even Trump will not say, usually as a way to allow Trump to later repeat some variant of them.

It was Stone who called a CNN commentator a “stupid Negro” and accused the Gold Star parents of Captain Humayun Khan of being Muslim Brotherhood agents. And it was Stone who threatened to give out the hotel room numbers of unsupportive Republicans at the party convention, the better for the Trumpian mob to find them.

He tastes the food for the king to make sure it’s not poison. If it doesn’t kill Roger Stone, it will not kill Donald Trump.

Picking up on Trump’s rigged-election meme, Stone told a right-wing news outlet that the electoral fix was already in: “The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in.” The outcome is fair only if Trump wins.

“If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience,” he said.

It would be laughable if the campaign were simply laying down the grand excuse for the label that will follow the tyrant from Trump Tower after Novwmber 8 — loser. But Trump has crossed all barriers of precedent and civility, from waging an openly racist campaign to loose talk about nuclear weapons. He has challenged the independence of the judiciary system, and called for a religious test for entry into this nation. With this latest tactic, he’s trying to destabilize the country itself after he’s crushed.

Let’s talk about the basis for his sore loser uprising — the gaming of the system. Trump’s casinos were rigged, as are all gambling parlors, in favor of the house. Italian soccer is rigged. But there is virtually no evidence of modern American elections being fixed.

Studying national elections from 2000 to 2014, and looking at 834 million ballots cast, Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School found a total of 31 instances of credible voter fraud. Yes, 31. The Bush administration, after a five-year investigation concluding in 2007, found no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections. A federal judge in Wisconsin found that “virtually no voter impersonation occurs.”

Trump’s evidence? “I just hear things and I just feel it.” Yeah, he hears things. Like Russia not actually taking over Crimea. Like President Obama not being an American citizen. Like the NFL writing him an imaginary letter. “The voter ID situation has turned out to be a very unfair development,” he said this week. “We may have people vote 10 times.”

He’s right about the unfairness of voter identification, but not in the way he means it. As a slew of recent court rulings have shown, Republican-led efforts to deny the vote to millions of citizens has rigged the system against the poor, the disabled, ethnic minorities. A voter- suppression law in North Carolina targeted blacks “with almost surgical precision,” an appeals court ruled.

Nationwide rigging, though difficult to do in a system with more than 9,000 voting jurisdictions, is more likely to come from Russian efforts at hacking voting machines, given Vladimir Putin’s apparent attempt to tip things in favor of his fellow authoritarian, the unstable Donald Trump.

With his inability to process basic information, Trump has gone down this road before. After the 2012 contest, which Romney lost by nearly five million votes, Trump said: “This election is a total sham and travesty. We are not a democracy.” The last statement, judging by the groundwork he’s doing for this November, looks more like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
After a week in which Donald Trump insulted babies and their mothers and war heroes and their families, and threw in fire marshals for good measure, the scariest thing to come out of his team of thugs and political mercenaries is this: the suggestion that civil unrest could follow if he’s denied the presidency.

When the Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the White House in 2000 even though he lost the popular vote, Al Gore graciously conceded and faded away. When Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama four years ago although his internal polls showed a Republican triumph, he congratulated the winner and went off to rediscover his many grandchildren.

Despite party-machine manipulation and considerable voting of the dead, the American institution that produces a peaceful transfer of power has survived.

But this year, facing a likely trouncing in November, Trump has signaled that he will try to bring down our democracy with him. His overlooked comment — “I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged” — is the opening move in a scheme to delegitimize the outcome.

Because Trump is consistently barbaric and such a prolific liar, it’s hard to sustain outrage over any one of his serial scandals. But his pre-emptive attack on the electoral process is very troubling.

To understand what Trump is up to, listen to his doppelgänger, the veteran political operative Roger Stone. He will say things that even Trump will not say, usually as a way to allow Trump to later repeat some variant of them.

It was Stone who called a CNN commentator a “stupid Negro” and accused the Gold Star parents of Capt. Humayun Khan of being Muslim Brotherhood agents. And it was Stone who threatened to give out the hotel room numbers of unsupportive Republicans at the party convention, the better for the Trumpian mob to find them.

He tastes the food for the king to make sure it’s not poison. If it doesn’t kill Roger Stone, it will not kill Donald Trump.

Picking up on Trump’s rigged-election meme, Stone told a right-wing news outlet that the electoral fix was already in: “The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in.” The outcome is fair only if Trump wins.

“If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience,” he said.

It would be laughable if the campaign were simply laying down the grand excuse for the label that will follow the tyrant from Trump Tower after Nov. 8 — loser. But Trump has crossed all barriers of precedent and civility, from waging an openly racist campaign to loose talk about nuclear weapons. He has challenged the independence of the judiciary system, and called for a religious test for entry into this nation. With this latest tactic, he’s trying to destabilize the country itself after he’s crushed.

Let’s talk about the basis for his sore loser uprising — the gaming of the system. Trump’s casinos were rigged, as are all gambling parlors, in favor of the house. Italian soccer is rigged. But there is virtually no evidence of modern American elections being fixed.

Studying national elections from 2000 to 2014, and looking at 834 million ballots cast, Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School found a total of 31 instances of credible voter fraud. Yes, 31. The Bush administration, after a five-year investigation concluding in 2007, found no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections. A federal judge in Wisconsin found that “virtually no voter impersonation occurs.”

Trump’s evidence? “I just hear things and I just feel it.” Yeah, he hears things. Like Russia not actually taking over Crimea. Like President Obama not being an American citizen. Like the N.F.L. writing him an imaginary letter. “The voter ID situation has turned out to be a very unfair development,” he said this week. “We may have people vote 10 times.”

He’s right about the unfairness of voter identification, but not in the way he means it. As a slew of recent court rulings have shown, Republican-led efforts to deny the vote to millions of citizens has rigged the system against the poor, the disabled, ethnic minorities. A voter- suppression law in North Carolina targeted blacks “with almost surgical precision,” an appeals court ruled.

Nationwide rigging, though difficult to do in a system with more than 9,000 voting jurisdictions, is more likely to come from Russian efforts at hacking voting machines, given Vladimir Putin’s apparent attempt to tip things in favor of his fellow authoritarian, the unstable Donald Trump.

With his inability to process basic information, Trump has gone down this road before. After the 2012 contest, which Romney lost by nearly five million votes, Trump said: “This election is a total sham and travesty. We are not a democracy.” The last statement, judging by the groundwork he’s doing for this November, looks more like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ω

[Timothy Egan writes "Outposts," a column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America (2009).]

Reports of Donald Trump’s demise are an exaggeration, to paraphrase and repurpose Mark Twain.

Yes, he can’t stop shooting off his mouth and shooting himself in the foot, and there are reports that his messy campaign is nearing the point of mutiny.

Yes, he knows nearly nothing about world affairs and that becomes ever more apparent every time he stumbles through an interview. Sir, Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014, the same year you filmed your last installment of your reality game show “The Celebrity Apprentice.”

Yes, his continued feud with the family of a fallen Muslim soldier may be the most ill advised and foolhardy folly in recent political memory (Trump keeps racking these up.) This is the same man who received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War, one for “bone spurs in his heels” according to The New York Times. While throngs of his contemporaries were fighting — and dying – in battle, Trump was being featured on the front page of The Times after he and his father were sued by the Department of Justice for anti-black bias in their rental properties.

Three years later, The Times profiled him with a backhanded compliment of the nouveau riche: “He rides around town in a chauffeured silver Cadillac with his initials, DJT, on the plates. He dates slinky fashion models, belongs to the most elegant clubs and, at only 30 years of age, estimates that he is worth ‘more than $200 million.’”

Yes, he doesn’t seem to know the difference between Tim Kaine, the Democratic Virginia senator whom Hillary Clinton tapped as her running mate, and Tom Kean, the Republican former governor of New Jersey who last held that office 26 years ago, the same year Trump boasted in his book “Surviving at the Top,” “I’ve never had any trouble in bed,” and counseled in Vanity Fair, “When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass — a good one! — there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left.”

Yes, yes, yes.

But Donald Trump is bigger than all of this, or shall I say, smaller.

He appeals to something deeper, something baser: Fear. His whole campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is in fact an inverted admission of loss — lost primacy, lost privilege, lost prestige.

And who feels that they have lost the most? White men.

As the New York Times’Upshot pointed out in July, “According to our estimates, Mrs. Clinton is doing better among basically every group of voters except for white men without a degree.” Put another way: “Hillary Clinton is largely performing as well or better than Barack Obama did in 2012, except among white men without a degree.”

Indeed, a Monday report in The Times put it this way: “A New York Times/CBS News poll two weeks ago found that white men preferred her Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, to Mrs. Clinton almost two to one, 55 percent to 29 percent.”

These are the voters keeping Trump’s candidacy alive.

He appeals to a regressive, patriarchal American whiteness in which white men prospered, in part because racial and ethnic minorities, to say nothing of women as a whole, were undervalued and underpaid, if not excluded altogether.

White men reigned supreme in the idealized history, and all was good with the world. (It is curious that Trump never specifies a period when America was great in his view. Did it overlap with the women’s rights, civil rights or gay rights movements? For whom was it great?)

Trump’s wall is not practical, but it is metaphor. Trump’s Muslim ban is not feasible, but it is metaphor. Trump’s huge deportation plan isn’t workable, but it is metaphor.

There is a portion of the population that feels threatened by unrelenting change — immigration, globalization, terrorism, multiculturalism — and those people want someone to, metaphorically at least, build a wall around their cultural heritage, which they conflate in equal measure with American heritage.

In their minds, whether explicitly or implicitly, America is white, Christian, straight and male-dominated. If you support Trump, you are on some level supporting his bigotry and racism. You don’t get to have a puppy and not pick up the poop.

And acceptance of racism is an act of racism. You are convicted by your complicity.

I am not accustomed to dancing around an issue; I prefer to call it what it is. I prefer to shine a bright light on it until it withers. Supporting Trump is indefensible and it makes you as much of a pariah as he is.

“Don’t you understand that the people who do this thing, who practice racism, are bereft? There is something distorted about the psyche. It’s a huge waste, and it’s a corruption, and a distortion. Its like it’s a profound neurosis that nobody examines for what it is.”

That stops here, today. For as long as racism and tribalism and xenophobia exist in this country, Trump’s foibles will not signal his ultimate failure. But let’s not let off the people who prop him up, claiming that they’re simply being party loyalists, or Hillary haters or having Supreme Court concerns.

Trump is a mirror. He is a reflection of — indeed a revealing of — the ugliness that you harbor, only it is possible that you may have gone your life expressing it in ways that were more coded and politic. Trump is an unfiltered primal scream of the fragility and fear consuming white male America. Ω

[Charles M. Blow is The New York Times's visual Op-Ed columnist. His column appears every other Saturday. Blow joined The New York Times in 1994 as a graphics editor and quickly became the paper's graphics director, a position he held for nine years. In that role, he led The Times to a best of show award from the Society of News Design for The Times's information graphics coverage of 9/11, the first time the award had been given for graphics coverage. He also led the paper to its first two best in show awards from the Malofiej International Infographics Summit for work that included coverage of the Iraq war. Charles Blow went on to become the paper's Design Director for News before leaving in 2006 to become the Art Director of National Geographic magazine. Before coming to The Times, Blow had been a graphic artist at The Detroit News. Blow received a BA (mass communication, magna cum laude) from Grambling State University.]

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About Me

Born on a dark and stormy night in early 1941. I've lived a life of trial and error for more than 3 score and 10 years. It's been like hitting myself in the head with a hammer; it will feel so good when I can stop.